Vic broke his rule of never promising something he wasn’t certain he could deliver.
‘I won’t come back without him.’
31. Ugly Chicken
England — France | 10–11 July
‘I still don’t know if I made the right decision,’ Fahad said. ‘But Rana says that he’s happy with it. So there’s that.’
Rana had consulted Ugly Chicken in a Burger King on the A13, after Chloe had called the emergency number that Sandra Hamilton had given her, and had been told to sit tight and wait for pickup. The little girl had mumbled into the microphone of her fist and cocked her head as if listening to a reply, sometimes with a grave expression, sometimes smiling and nodding. ‘It’s private,’ she’d said, when Chloe had wondered what they were talking about. And, ‘He’ll tell me if he has anything to say to you.’
Chloe asked Fahad if Ugly Chicken ever spoke to him, but he ignored the question, saying, ‘Maybe it’ll come good in the end.’
They were sitting at a pine table in the kitchen of a safe house somewhere in Kent. Fahad was absent-mindedly sketching on a pad of paper that Sandra had supplied. Rough outlines of the usual landscape done in swift confident lines with red and black Sharpies, each image torn from the pad and crumpled when it was done. He was left-handed.
He told Chloe that the need to draw came over him like a fierce hunger. The first time, he’d stayed up all night, growing ever more frustrated because he couldn’t get down on paper what pressed inside his head. The raw urgent need had frightened him, but he’d learned by trial and error which drawings eased its grip.
He was scribbling with the black Sharpie now, outlining the shape of the alien space he’d tried to reproduce in the squalid bedroom at the sea fort. Chloe asked him if it was the interior of one of the spires; he said he wasn’t sure.
‘I call it the black room, but I don’t know if it’s really a room. Rana shows her drawings to Ugly Chicken, but he won’t talk to her about my stuff. He won’t say what they are, or why he makes me draw them. Maybe he doesn’t know how he affects other people.’
‘I think he had a pretty good idea about what he was doing, at the Reef.’
‘We can’t control it. It just happens.’
Fahad hadn’t seen the manifestation at the Reef: he’d never seen Ugly Chicken in any guise. And although Rana drew her starburst pictures over and over, she wouldn’t ever draw her imaginary friend. It was one of the things he didn’t like, according to her. After showing her pictures of all kinds of birds, Fahad believed that Ugly Chicken looked a little like a cross between a pelican and a turkey vulture. Sort of squashed and mostly naked, patched with bright colours. A big crooked beak for a mouth, eyes of different sizes and number, not all of them on its head. He spoke directly to Rana and they had created a world of rules and customs, things that had to be done in a particular way, things that were forbidden. Fahad said that she’d always liked to order her family of dolls and stuffed animals and robots about, explaining their relationships to each other, refereeing their squabbles. She had incorporated Ugly Chicken into those games; it used those games to communicate with her. And it put pictures in Fahad’s head, and he felt that he had to get them down on paper or die.
He ripped out the half-completed sketch of the black room and smoothed the next sheet of paper and picked up the red Sharpie, drew the outline of a spire in two swift strokes, dashed lines on either side to indicate the rounded hills at the horizon. Looking up at Chloe, smiling. ‘At first, I thought I had gone crazy. Now I know it has a purpose.’
Chloe picked up one of his crumpled sketches, flattened it on the table, and said, ‘You know what this is, where this is?’
‘Do you believe in fate?’
Fahad had a way of abruptly changing the subject when she asked him a question he didn’t want to answer.
Chloe said, ‘That depends on what you mean by fate, I guess.’
‘I mean, do you believe that we were supposed to meet? That something ordered the world so that our paths would cross?’
Chloe took his questions seriously. She thought of how she’d walked out of the rehearsals for the select-committee appearance. How she’d decided to justify it by chasing up Mr Archer’s Facebook announcement. Had it been no more than a whim, or had she unconsciously responded to the background landscape of that announcement?
She said, ‘You think Ugly Chicken makes you draw that stuff because it knew I’d see it?’
‘You found me, didn’t you?’ Fahad said.
He had a nice smile, but rarely used it. He was serious and suspicious, with that mix of vulnerability and arrogance particular to teenage boys. He’d barely said more than a dozen words while they’d been waiting for Sandra Hamilton. Even Gail Ann hadn’t been able to crack his shell. And now that he was talking, it was clear that he wanted to steer the conversation in particular directions, to reveal only what he chose to reveal.
Chloe played along, saying, ‘Mr Archer’s meeting just happened to be taking place when I needed an excuse to be somewhere else. And anyone could have seen that announcement. Some other scout could have decided to check it out.’
‘But you did,’ Fahad said.
‘Me and Eddie Ackroyd.’
She thought of Eddie’s mysterious client. If he had been aimed towards that breakout, why not her? A shivery thought.
‘But he isn’t here, and you are.’ Fahad had sketched the intricate latticework of the spire; now he began to add the little spurs that ornamented its flanks. Quick precise tick marks. His tongue pressed into a corner of his mouth. When he was finished, he looked at Chloe and said, ‘I expect you think you rescued me. Me and Rana. But suppose we didn’t need to be rescued?’
‘I know you can look after yourself, that you can take care of your little sister. But there are some bad people looking for you, Fahad. Not just the police.’
‘We escaped from the bad people. All on our own. I found a place to live, got a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, Rana was back in school…But then Mr Archer started up his thing, and it seemed like a good idea to help him. Even though I sort of knew it wasn’t my idea. You found us, because of that, and then that weird sweaty guy in black…And I thought, maybe the bad guys could find us too.’
‘That’s why you ran away again.’
‘I didn’t run away. Rana and me moved in with some people I know. Friends, sort of, from the cage-fighting scene. And then you found us again. Maybe you could call it fate, but I don’t think so. I think he wanted it to happen.’
‘And what does he want now? What do you want?’
Fahad didn’t reply at once, but bent over the pad again, using the black Sharpie to cross-hatch the spire’s shadow across rocky ground evoked by spare dashes and scribbles of red ink. At last he said, ‘I suppose you know that my father is dead. Killed by the people he was working for.’
Chloe nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘He wasn’t a good man. He wasn’t even there for me most of the time. But he was trying to be good. When I was very young, in Pakistan, the government decided that intellectuals were enemies of the people. Both my father and mother worked in the University of the Punjab. She was a mathematician; he was a pharmaceutical engineer. There were pogroms, riots, against people like them. People were murdered. I had a sister, two years older than me. She was killed. One of my aunts had taken her shopping with our cousins, and they were all killed by a car bomb.’
Fahad had stopped drawing. He spoke quietly and precisely, as if reciting from memory. Retelling a story he’d been told many times.